Typography

I’m writing a book on Web Typography which I’m hoping to crowdfund on Kickstarter. It’ll be a handbook for designing beautiful and effective typography in modern websites, and I hope it’ll be available in time for Ampersand conference this year.

Last week Digital Arts online featured me, among others, in a piece on web fonts in 2015. My main points were twofold: more interesting treatments are required, and type designers keep giving us more fantastic materials to work with.

There used to be a page on Wikipedia listing pangrams in various languages. This was deleted yesterday. Pangrams can be occasioanlly useful for designers, so I’ve resurrected the page of here, pretty much as it was in Wikipedia.

I’m no lover of Helvetica but neither do I hate it. That said I really do have an aversion to Helvetica Neue Light, or rather an aversion to when Helvetica Neue Light is used without due thought and attention, and particularly within user interfaces.

In December 2005 I launched the Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web, a practical guide to web typography using Robert Bringhurst’s book “The Elements of Typographic Style”. The site needs updating, so I’ve now open sourced it on Github.

I want to design a new way for visual designers to find fonts which specifically suit their needs and the needs of their clients. This means approaching things by way of a user-centred design process. And I need your help.

There’s more to the lives of many typefaces than just Bold and Regular, but almost no browsers follow the proper CSS 1 way of specifying Light, Semibold, Black and other weights. There is a workaround, but it’s nasty.

Earlier this week it was announced that WebKit now supports CSS @font-face rules. There has been a mixed reception in some quarters, but this leap forward (for that’s what it is) has to be a good thing.

The Web Typography project continues to proceed, albeit at a glacial pace. One of the reasons for the slow progress is guidelines such as this: “verse quotations should be centered on the longest line”.

Just recently Jeffrey Zeldman was bemoaning the sub-standard state of text rendering in Firefox on a Mac. And the sad truth is he only skimmed the surface; Firefox, Safari, Opera and Camino may render even the same font differently.

This year, SxSW Interactive is enabling attendees to vote for panels to be featured in the conference. I’m hoping to present a talk with Mark Boulton called Web Typography Sucks. The Panel Proposal Picker Round Two is now live, so get your votes in!

Unicode Font Info is a really handy free application for OS X. Essentially it’s a font inspection tool with full support for Unicode 3.2, allowing you to easily navigate huge fonts with tens of thousands of supported glyphs.

Text for the screen is sized with CSS in terms of pixels, ems or keywords. Pixels is easy, keywords are well documented. That leaves ems. I will now attempt to show you how ems can be as quick and easy to use as pixels.

Typographers divide words using hyphens to increase readability. All books and newspapers of any quality use this technique to ‘justify’ their text, yet it is not a tool available to Web designers in any useful form.

Why and how Web designers should be using font-family in a more adventurous manner: there are some great typefaces out there – let’s use them. The Visibone survey is an invaluable aid in typeface selection.

Clagnut now uses a slightly customised version of Dean Allen’s wonderful Textile. Textile provides speedier text input (without having to mark up the input into my CMS) and formats the text nicely, with proper “typographer’s quotes” and so on.
There…

Why is the humble apostrophe so regularly misused and why are hairdressers
so often the culprits?
Ladie’s perm’s at half price
(As the Guardian readers’ editor points out, journalists who should know better
also get it wrong.)
Apostrophes have two…

The Guardian UK weblogs competition results are out. Obviously I didn’t win, however Scary Duck did. Highly commended were iMakeContent and Greenfairydotcom; runners up were blogjam, LinkMachineGo and Plenty of Taste. Congratulations to all the winners, all the entries…

Scene 360 asks the question of twenty three top zines and design portals: Why do you do it? A beautifully put together piece with some fascinating insight into how the likes of K10K and Design is Kinky think.
The Evolution of Type, a fine introduction to the origins, evolution…

Jakob mourns the demise of the text sizing buttons IE but fails to point out that it won’t have any effect on a Windows machine if text is sized in pixels.
Microsoft have stopped giving away their free web fonts.

Behind the typeface: Cooper Black – a brilliant satire. A cry for help with a smart quotes algorithm. Typography links including designing logos from ligatures. And how close to the real thing your wireframes should be when presented for user testing.

Frames and nested tables bemoan their demise: “NESTED TABLE: is there a place for us, for us maligned remnants of earlier html? We who are cast off by maturing web designers like the velveteen rabbit?”
And a fine explanation of the correct use of quotation marks.…

The Z-man pointed us to webactivism.org today. And a fine blog it is too with some great typographical postings, particularly on the value of Arial and Bringhurst.
And this coincides nicely with the latest Cre@teOnline magazine which has an errant focus on typography. I shall…

Mozilla 1.0. Stick a fork in it. It’s done and looking good.
Posted a few pikkies from the Mini Rally recently held in Brighton. Check out those wonderfully ridiculous chopped cars – why have a small car when you can have a tiny one?
Like me, Owen Briggs has been…

It is with much regret that I have to inform you of the demise of linesandsplines. A beautiful intellectual web log dedicated to the joys & aesthetics of typography. Often way above my amateurish knowledge of the subject – but that was the point for me – how…